A Bully Birthday

Few noticed and seemed to care, but as numismatists, we should have been in celebration for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was known as a reformer with a real vision as to how to modernize a nation still recovering from a bloody Civil War and draconian laws from the Victorian Age. Roosevelt was a man of strength and a man of peace. Roosevelt was the first US citizen to win Alfred Nobel’s prize, the first sitting president to be so awarded (the only other sitting president to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Woodrow Wilson for his founding of the League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations). He earned this honor for negotiating the 1905 peace treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War.

Unfortunately, Saint-Gaudens died of cancer before he could redesign the small cent. Roosevelt continued to look to revitalize US coinage and seized on Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday to redesign the small cent. He was steered to Victor David Brenner, whose bust of Lincoln was used as the model for the new Lincoln Cent first issued in 1909. Not only was Lincoln the first president to appear on a circulating coin, but Brenner’s obverse is still in use today.